2020

A Brief History of Quality

Recognizing the past while anticipating future customers’
needs

By Peter Merrill

To
become reacquainted with the fundamentals on how quality and innovation work in
tandem and to understand how these powers must be harnessed together, it’s
helpful to occasionally look back at where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

As you
see in the headline—borrowed from the title of Stephen Hawking’s modern
classic, A Brief History of Time1—I
want to offer a brief synopsis of the individuals, issues and events that
shaped the history of quality and discuss how innovation must be intertwined
with this ever-evolving discipline and way of thinking.

Many say the modern quality movement in the
United States originated after World War II when the world was regrouping from
so many unthinkable horrors. The United Nations formed in 1945, the
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1947 and the American
Society for Quality Control (ASQC) in 1946.

ASQC seemed to be a natural assemblance of quality professionals who wanted to retain
the camaraderie they had found during the war years. The year 1946 is actually
captured in the current ASQ toll-free number, 1-800-248-1946.

In those days, quality was about nuts and
bolts stuff, and it’s no coincidence that the first thing ISO standardized were
nuts and bolts after the chaos caused by nonstandard threads in World War II.

Throughout the 1950s, however, quality
prophets such as W. Edwards Deming and Joseph M. Juran
were largely ignored as North America went through a post-war manufacturing
boom. The quality prophets went to Japan where their message was appreciated.

In 1973, the price of oil shocked everyone
as it moved from $2 to $4 a barrel to nearly $15 a barrel.
Industry—already obese and inefficient—reacted by cutting costs.
Metaphorically, industry tried to lose weight by cutting off its arms and legs,
crippling itself in the process.

The U.S. auto industry, in particular, saw
the influx of Japanese vehicles that were built through a mysterious method
called "quality." In 1979, Philip B. Crosby published a book with the
provocative title, Quality is Free,2 and Deming was featured in an NBC documentary
in 1980 called "If Japan Can … Why Can’t We?"3

Quality management erupted through the
1980s and 1990s, and organizations became immersed in a desperate rush to learn
about quality. Crosby preached about how quality is the price of entry to the
market, and Deming reminded us that survival is not mandatory.

The quality management professional was
swept along by these developments as ASQC membership began to mushroom and ISO
collected the new body of knowledge into a document called ISO 9001.

ASQC dropped the "C" in 1997 and formally
changed its name to ASQ, recognizing the scope of quality had broadened. In all
of this euphoria, many of us forgot what this was all about, and others made
heretical statements such as "the word ‘quality’ gets in the way."

The delivery of quality became the primary
goal of a well-run organization that knows who its customers are, what they
want and sets direction to meet their needs. In truth, this is all about making
the organization succeed by delivering on the promise to the customer.

However,
as we know, the customer is a fickle beast and its needs change. Today,
customer needs are changing faster than ever.

A brief history of innovation

If you look at the spikes in knowledge growth
through history, you’ll notice they are getting closer. Ancient Egypt spiked in
3000 B.C., for example, and the effects of that knowledge explosion lasted for
more than half of our recorded history until 1000 B.C.

The
Greco-Roman knowledge explosion spiked with Alexander and Aristotle in 400 B.C.
This lasted less than a thousand years, until the fall of Rome in the fourth
century. We emerged from the Dark Ages with the Renaissance and the work of
artistic giants such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

A mere 300 years later, the industrial
revolution arrived, and the next big spike in knowledge growth (1880-1920) was
the era of the inventor. As the United States emerged from the carnage of the
Civil War, communities across the country started to grow and the Industrial
Revolution gathered steam along with business and trade.

Henry Ford saw that the demand for speedy
travel would not be fulfilled with faster horses, Alexander Graham Bell knew
that the need to communicate would not be solved with the telegraph, and Thomas
Edison realized the shortcomings of oil and gas lighting in the home.

Just 100 years later, we are living in the
innovation generation and experiencing another explosion of knowledge through
IT. We are in an age in which people are expecting us to innovate. It’s not
just nice to come up with new ideas. Customers and consumers are expecting
it—and are actively "chasing cool."4

The
first person to write about innovation was, ironically, Niccolò
Machiavelli.5 In this century, economist Joseph A. Schumpeter was
the first person to address innovation in depth when he discussed destructive
innovation in 1942,6 and Peter Drucker
introduced the concept of innovation to business in 1955.7 Drucker was again controversial when he said there were
only two functions that mattered in business: marketing and innovation.

Business process areas

For business
success in the future, we must think about tomorrow’s customers and what their
needs will be. We tend to focus on today’s customers and address their
immediate concerns. Business also has focused inwardly, and this has caused us
to neglect the future. Figure 1 shows the four primary business process areas:

Market
development.

Product
development.

Product
delivery.

Infrastructure,
which holds the process areas together.

In the last half of the 20th century,
business focused heavily on improving delivery of its products and services.
Business demonstrated this inward focus by investing in just two of the four
main business process areas: infrastructure (through investment in IT) and
product delivery (through investment in quality management).

For a business expecting long-term success,
the investment in delivery and infrastructure must be balanced with investments
in market development and product development. That means investment in
innovation.

Unfortunately, business has not positioned
itself well for innovation. At the end of the 20th century, business focused on
improving the delivery of existing products and services, and less on
developing new markets and new products. As a result, quality management has
frequently become internally focused.

The harsh reality is that if a product or
service has become outdated, the effort to improve its delivery efficiency is
totally wasted. Innovation is about developing the products and services that
the market needs tomorrow, and is driven by the need for convenience, not by
technology.

Finding a cool new idea—while it may
be interesting and exciting—has no value unless the idea solves a real
problem. Even then, new ideas only will be adopted if they are easy to adopt.

Quality and innovation

The true quality
professional recognizes there are always customer needs that have not been met.
To completely fill the needs of the customer, we must seek to deliver a
solution that’s probably beyond the existing capabilities of our organization.
The quality professional with vision wants to address these unfulfilled needs
and does this by innovating. We find innovation opportunities when we go to the
customer to learn which needs have not been fulfilled.

People have been schooled over the last 30
years to "do it right the first time."8 However, if you are not
doing the right things and your product or service has become outdated or
matured, your effort to improve efficiency is wasted. Innovation is about
developing the right things—the products and services that the market
needs tomorrow.

Culture clash

I’m often asked,
"How do we develop an innovation culture?" This is a challenge because much of
what organizations have implemented over the last 20 years can inhibit
creativity in innovation.

The second reason for difficulty is that
there are, in fact, two cultures.

Culture is based on behavior, and the
creative phase of innovation requires the behaviors of exploration,
collaboration and experimentation. We explore less because we have become
attached to our desks and computer screens.

Although we think otherwise, we collaborate
less because the bandwidth of e-communication is far less than the bandwidth of
interpersonal communication. We experiment less because we have become
increasingly risk averse. Creative behaviors must be restored.

The coexistence of creative behavior and an
execution culture—getting things done—requires careful managing.
It’s too easy for the execution culture to kill the creative culture.

Supporting these behaviors, the community
of innovation is something for an organization to consider in the early days of
culture development. This community grows the knowledge and understanding
needed for the organization and individual projects. ASQ did this with its
Innovation Interest Group, which grew rapidly into the Innovation Division.

Innovation never stops

We must set
direction for innovation and make tough decisions on which ideas to pursue.
Direction is derived from market need and the organization’s core competencies.
Rest assured, that direction will change. You start
the change by focusing on a product, service or market segment with declining
revenue.

As the
innovation process starts working, the organization must understand the process
is a cycle. The lifetime of knowledge shrinks in periods of rapid innovation,
and as the pace of change increases, we are becoming increasingly aware of the
need for speed and that innovation never stops.

References and Notes

Stephen
Hawking, A Brief History of Time, Bantam, 1988.

Philip
B. Crosby, Quality is Free, Penguin Books, 1979.

"If
Japan Can … Why Can’t We?" was an American TV episode broadcast by NBC News as
part of the show’s NBC White Paper on June 24, 1980. The episode is often
credited with beginning the quality revolution in the United States.

Peter Merrill is president of Quest Management Systems, an
innovation consultancy based in Burlington, Ontario. Merrill is the author of
several ASQ Quality Press books, including Do It Right the
Second Time, second edition (2009), and Innovation Generation (2008). He is a member of ASQ and chair of the ASQ Innovation Division.